How to suppress women's coding

Last week, GitHub’s first female developer, Julie Ann Horvath, quit the company over a staggering string of allegations that while working there she was subjected to harassment, intimidation, and sexism in the workplace. Considering Horvath also launched GitHub’s Passion Projects initiative to recruit more women into the Open Source community, this was quite a loss. GitHub has responded by putting the founder at the source of her claims on leave pending an investigation.

In discussing what to do in response to the GitHub debacle, we floated the inevitable idea: write about how every woman who ever makes an issue of sexism in tech culture or geek culture is routinely subjected to backlash or harassment.

In the days to come, you’ll read think pieces that examine sexism in Open Source communities. You’ll read roundups of similar issues in tech and geek culture, like the ones we’ve written many times over. You might even hear of the inevitable backlash and harassment that always seems to follow whenever a woman speaks about sexism in tech or geek culture.

But if there’s one thing to take away from what happened to Horvath, it’s a glimpse of a culture in which women’s voices are silenced, the same thing we learned from Joanna Russ’s landmark exploration of the systemic marginalization of women in publishing.

Is she still talking? Quick, find excuses to stop listening. Brand certain words as buzzwords that signal that an Agenda is taking place. Make sure as soon as someone drops a buzzword you stop listening.

Privilege. Intersectionality. Misogyny. If words like these find their way into a conversation, take that as a signal to downvote that conversation, or dismiss the person who used them as an angry social justice warrior. Make it clear you don’t approve of anyone who might be a feminist with an agenda coming into your environment and looking for “storms in teacups” to get upset about.

If she keeps talking after all this? Time to get serious.

Is she trying to talk about the way your industry’s products hurt women? Send her death threats. Did she have the audacity to get hit on by a fellow con-goer or sexually harassed by her own boss at a tech conference? Death threats. Is she a female game developer who admitted she didn’t like to play certain kinds of games? Harass her for years until she finally quits her job in order to protect her family from death threats. Did she call out the men sitting behind her at a tech conference? Send her death threats and DDOS her employer’s website until she gets fired and goes into hiding.

Heck, just harass her because she’s a woman. Harass the head of Xbox for being a woman. Harass the community moderator of a gaming project because she’s a woman. Did she try to encourage more participation from other women in Open Source projects? Death threats.